Mozilla and Samsung Collaborate on New Browser Engine

Mozilla is collaborating with Samsung on a new web browser engine called Servo.

According to a recent announcement on the Mozilla blog, Brendan Eich states that “Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web.”

Servo is written in Rust, a new systems language simultaneously being developed by Mozilla. According to Mozilla, Rust, which is now at version 0.6, has been in development for several years and offers “efficient high-level, multi-paradigm abstractions” and “precise control over hardware resources.”

Mozilla also announced that, together with Samsung, they are bringing Rust and Servo to Android and ARM. Eich states that Samsung has already contributed an ARM back end to Rust along with the build infrastructure needed to cross-compile to Android. “At the same time, we will be putting more resources into Servo, trying to prove that we can build a fast web browser with pervasive parallelism, and in a safe, fun language,” Eich said.

Largely unnoticed by the public, the Mozilla Foundation is tinkering with its own programming language, Rust, which is intended to make writing reliable, fast, and concurrently running applications easier. For this purpose, the developers are borrowing generously from other languages.

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